The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships. - Anton Chekhov

A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

I became her lover. For a month anyway I was like a madman, conscious of nothing but rapture. To hold in one's arms a young and lovely body, with bliss to feel her warmth every time one waked up from sleep, and to remember that she was there--she, my Ariadne!-- ... I realised, as before, that Ariadne did not love me. But she wanted to be really in love, she was afraid of solitude

Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years